Digital Marketing Vs Inbound Marketing: What’s the Diff?

Marketing a business can seem confusing if you’re new to the marketing game. There’s inbound marketing, outbound marketing, digital marketing, quality marketing, and all sorts of other marketing lingo to learn. Below we’ll clarify at least two of those industry terms for you, and hopefully inspire you to try some new strategies out in your own business.

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a technique that includes any and all marketing strategies involving the internet and digital or electronic devices. Most businesses nowadays use digital marketing through various digital platforms including social media, websites and blogs, as well as search engines (SEO), Pay-Per-Click ads, content marketing, emails, etc., to promote their business and reach out to potential customers.

What is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that is customer-oriented, instead of being brand-oriented. Inbound marketing is done through content creation that is designed to attract or interest your target audience, and expose them to the products and services you have to offer.

This client attraction model focuses on providing customers with valuable information that essentially works as an indirect advertisement for your brand; once the customer is interested, you can then follow up with direct advertisements.

Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing

Where digital marketing is a broad term encompassing all marketing techniques involving digital technologies, inbound marketing is a little more specific. While digital marketing requires you to advertise and promote various products and services your brand offers directly, and provides information about them only once the customer shows interest, inbound marketing does the opposite.

With inbound marketing, the information about the product or service is the hook that lures the clients. The key difference between digital marketing and inbound marketing can be summarized in just a few words; inbound marketing is a strategy that deals with the actual purposes and ideas behind your products and services, whereas digital marketing is a way of bringing brand services to your customers.

Tips for Marketing Effectively

Whether you want to use digital marketing or inbound marketing, as a client attraction strategy, some basic tips and tricks can be used to boost your results.

Define your goals––the first thing is to define your goals and figure out what success would look like to you and your brand. Once you know where you want to go, you can figure out how to get there.

Decide your strategy––identify the target audience and gather some information about the potential customers including age groups, gender, locations, etc. When you have that information, you can decide on a strategy that would sit well with the target audience and your brand goals.

Make a timeline––make timelines for the various digital marketing platforms you are using, including social media posting schedule, as well as email schedule.

Are Inbound Marketing and Digital Marketing Complementary?

100% yes! Both can be used in a client attraction model and used in conjunction with each other to market your business more efficiently, and effectively. Remember that quality leads are the best kind, so when you can use digital marketing strategies and attract inbound leads to your business, you’ve got a leading edge over businesses that do not.